Filmmaker Knight rides a one-man show

Saturday

May 3, 2014 at 11:00 AMMay 16, 2014 at 7:35 AM

British filmmaker Steven Knight had only directed one film before “Locke,” which opens May 9. The film's gimmick is that only one person in a car is on camera, though he's constantly talking on a Bluetooth to other very important people in his life.

By Ed SymkusFor The Patriot Ledger

British filmmaker Steven Knight had only directed one film before “Locke,” which opens May 9. That was the Jason Statham crime drama “Hummingbird,” which got very limited release in the ’States last year under the title “Redemption.” But Knight had found great success as a screenwriter, with David Cronenberg’s gritty “Eastern Promises” and an Oscar nomination for “Pretty Little Things” on his resume.

“Redemption” gave him a good taste for both writing and directing, so when the idea for “Locke” came to him – while he was still editing “Redemption” – he knew he would also direct it.

He also knew, very early on, that Tom Hardy was going to star in this one-man piece that would be told in real time, and take place entirely in a car that was heading through the night toward a meeting with destiny in London.

“This project was blessed with lots of serendipity,” said Knight, 54, during a recent promotional stop in Boston. “I was meeting with Tom. His people, as they say, had requested a meeting with me, to ask me to write something for him. It was for some other project, not this one. When Tom and I got to talking, I brought up this idea, and he was really interested. So I wrote it with him in mind. So we met in November, and in February we were filming. And I wrote it in between. That almost never happens.”

The character, Ivan Locke, is a man on a mission. Before he plopped down into his BMW at the film’s start, his thoughts were wrapped up in his happy family life – a wife and two boys – and in his job as a high-ranking construction foreman on London skyscrapers. An error in judgment, perhaps a bit too much to drink one night many months back, has now set him on a personal journey which puts his normal life on hold.

The film’s gimmick is that he’s the only person on camera, though he’s constantly talking, on a Bluetooth, to other very important people in his life as he makes his way along the M6 motorway.

“It was a challenge,” said Knight, of keeping viewers engaged with one person in a very confined space. “In terms of writing, I thought I had a way of doing it, because it’s phone calls about different subjects. You can leave everything on a cliffhanger, move on to the next one, then do the next cliffhanger, then resolve that one and do another one.

“What I thought was essential was that people get distracted from the fact that this is a novelty way of making a film. They’ve got to get into the story, by the sixth or seventh minute. The best thing people have said is that they forget they haven’t seen the other characters, that they have to make them up themselves.”

Another aspect of the serendipity surrounding the production was that because Knight was making it for so little money (reports are that it came in under $1 million), he had pretty much total control over what he was doing. An early decision was to shoot it live, like a play.

Knight explained: “We would put the car on the low loader [a car carrier, which made it appear Hardy was driving], and Tom had autocue with the whole script on it, like newsreaders use, in four places in the car, so he didn’t have to remember the lines.

“We put three cameras in the car. The other actors were in a conference room in a hotel with a phone link to the car, and I was on the low loader with Tom. We would cue the first call, and then we would shoot the whole film, beginning to end, without stopping. So I would say action only once, and do the whole thing, end it, have a break, and then do it again. We did this for eight days, so we had 16 complete films.”

When those were done, Knight sat down with his editor, Justine Wright, and over a five-week period, put together pieces from all 16 versions.

“There was so much material!” he said. “And there was no continuity issue with the background because he’s always moving, and it’s always different. So we could cut the film purely on performance.”

Yet there was one part of Hardy’s low-key almost Zen-like performance that could have been a problem. As they were about to set out on the tight, eight-day filming schedule, Hardy arrived in the throes of an awful head cold.

“When he showed up with a cold, there was a choice. You could either put makeup on his nose and dry him up, or just go with it. The decision was to go with it because in fiction usually either you have a cold or your marriage breaks up. But in reality they can easily happen at the same time,” said Knight, laughing. “Tom credits some of his calmness to the Nyquil he was drinking. Because when he’s taking the medicine in the film, he’s really taking it.”